But there’s even more good news! If you happen to miss your chance to purchase these cups on Friday, never fear. Shanna and I have decided to release this item (and the equally smile-inducing Optimist Tumbler) as an open edition, with NO CAP on the quantity available, beginning February 20th. We are moving studios at then end of the month and just need a few weeks to get settled before we open the floodgates. Never again will the feeling of missing out on these pieces befall anyone again!

And if that weren’t enough, I’m pleased to let everyone know that we are also working on a permanent holiday line for next Christmas season.

We launched these last weekend at the Sunday Best sale, and this coming weekend I will have them at my booth at the Portland Bazaar (hope to see you there!). Any remaining stock will be listed on my website for sale on Monday morning (Dec 12) 10 am PST for those far flung from Portland with nimble fingers. They will ship out right away in time for holiday delivery. Stock is limited, so apologies but we cannot hold any for you (in the interest of fairness).

I laid everything out in illustrator to scale as I was planning (highly recommended for first-timers and those that can’t possible do a mock-up in person) to make install a quick and easy process (in all, it took about 9 hours from start to finish with two people). Our booth was 60 square feet. Click to enlarge:

First we painted the hardwalls a dark blue black (Behr’s ‘Sled‘ in a matte finish) for a dramatic contrast with the porcelain, and added our logo in a pearl white vinyl. Yes, we were conveniently (and often, irritatingly) located adjacent to the women’s restroom.

The shelves were custom-made for us. The brackets are wide strips of bent steel with a square end cap to hold the wood in place, the wood is simple planks of fir that fit snugly into the top of the bracket, held in place by gravity (so no screws to damage the surface, plus it breaks down compactly for shipping). The stools are from overstock.com and surprisingly great for the price.

To suspend our hanging pieces we chose 1/2″  black plumbing pipe in two depths. It keeps with the industrial aesthetic of the booth, is inexpensive, and breaks down flat with a simple twist. We bought some basic s-hooks from Ikea used to hang pots and pans to attach all the pieces. For writing orders we purchased a white lacquer tripod table from West Elm to echo the white of the vinyl in the foreground. Plus, it ships flat-packed, which was crucial for shipping freight cross-country.

At this point, we were mostly just unwrapping, styling, pricing and positioning lights for maximum effect. We had several metal risers also custom made for us to add variety to the shelving display. The test tubes mounted on the wall also ended up with sunflowers I purchased from the Union Square market.

We brought along the chevron pixel storage basket from our SS 2011 textile line for hiding our extra marketing materials. We also suspended our string lights along the top of the booth (one of the more challenging aspects to plan with the booth sight-unseen), and made glaze color tiles out of our facet drawer pull shapes, which were the surprise hit of the show.

Here’s the final booth during the show with the lovely Elspeth holding down the fort. We had a video about our process made prior to attending that played on a loop on my ipad throughout.

More soon…

Anyway, this is all to say that I now fully embrace the interdisciplinary self and have also realized just how interconnected + overlapping the creative process is, regardless of medium or subject. I suppose fashion has more of a relationship to what I do now than most, given the 3D and functional nature of that kind of work, and my background working amongst the most lovely items of clothing probably lends a second level of appreciation to this. So when I can across this video of Chie Mihara discussing how she designs her gorgeous shoes, it struck a cord with me. It was lovely to see how low-tech and organic the beginning stages of her work is – and she began much like me in fine art before realizing her place was a bit more commercial. Plus you know me, can’t resist a process video. Just wait till you see ours, it should be done in about a week (!!).

If you want to know a secret, I was a hard-core 2D artist in college and practially failed the foundation 3D design course. I couldn’t be bothered. Sorry David, for being such a little shit. It’s amazing, the things we think we know at 20. Cringe.

Thanks to the ladies at Lille for posting this video. Lucky ducks, meeting her.

These vases are by West Elm and can be yours for an affordable $8- $12. At that price these are of course, made en masse on a machine somewhere overseas, but feature a “hand made raw edge” that lends them an Etsy-infused aesthetic. Mostly, it’s the pretending to be something it’s not that rubs me the wrong way, or perhaps just the dawning realization that as I try to make my work more consistent and uniform, large companies are intentionally going the other way to help themselves to a piece of the already-small handmade pie. The marketer in me say “duh!” and even, ‘smart business move’, but the small business designer in me is sighing, wishing they’d just gone ahead and hired Up In The Air Somewhere, whose work has a spirit that especially the bottom one echos, albeit much more refined.

the natural speaker from Studio Joon&Jung on Vimeo.

Sending me a picture of a design you found somewhere out there in the wide world of the internet or beyond that you’d like me to recreate is insulting to both me and (especially) the original maker. No, I will not replicate something designed by someone else that you deem too expensive for less for you. This is confounding on several levels – but lets start with the idea that handmade is somehow associated with being a better deal. A lot of the products I’m sent are mass produced or machine made – why would it be cheaper for me to hand make said product in the US in a more refined material? I feel like this comes up a lot and it seems to be a byproduct of us makers consistently undervaluing our work in the fear of not making money  — handmade should cost more and it’s time we work together to turn this perception around. Secondly, and to me more importantly, is the lack of respect for the intellectual property of the original designer. Clever or innovative work should be rewarded, not stolen and watered down. Companies big and small do this every single day, often under the banner of populism, and while one of my main beliefs is in making good design affordable, it should also be said that good design isn’t easy and shouldn’t be treated as such. This is not a conversation about being influenced or taking inspiration from other designers (of which we all do whether you’ll admit it or not, the merits of which are part of a different discussion). This is about asking for blatant and unabashed replication. The idea that I would have no problem doing that (and oh my the gall in even asking!), as a designer myself, is also a bit soul-crushing. So this is me, announcing to the world, that the answer is firmly and always NO. And I hope you’ll join me.